The Great Debate

No matter how artificial and canned the candidates can seem at a presidential debate, no matter how competent or ineffectual the moderator — the nominee’s true self will peak out at some point.

Thus did GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney tip his hand when it comes to the all-important female vote — which both he and President Barack Obama have been scrambling after. He didn’t make a huge gaffe or get ensnared in a tough debate about choice. Moving around the stage, he seemed a 1950s throwback who had wandered in from a different decade — one where men were men, women wore shirtwaist dresses (Ann Romney’s uniform) and marriage was between a man and a woman.

Of course what drove this home was Romney’s anecdote about trying to find talented women for his staff when he was governor of Massachusetts from 2003-2007. He said he actually went to a number of women’s groups “and they brought us whole binders full of women.” Though he apparently flipped this story: The groups came to him unsolicited.

However it happened, it was the telling moment, the one that has continued to dog him.

What? He couldn’t just look around and find qualified women? He couldn’t look through the ranks of his colleagues at Bain Capital or down the corridors of state power and pick out any number of terrific women? No, quite clearly he didn’t know such women because he was still operating in a world of men — the place he is comfortable.

By Abe Sauer
The opinions expressed are his own.

The morning after Mississippi voters rejected a constitutional amendment to define a fertilized human egg as a person, Personhood USA was far from conceding defeat. Instead, after its second such defeat in as many years, the personhood movement was learning from its mistakes and planning a next attempt, which may come as early as 2012, and maybe in your state.

The amendment—which was heavily favored until it was not—would have made abortion, already roadblocked by process requirements and done by only one provider in the state, illegal. That was an intended consequence most Mississippians were behind. It was the amendment’s unknowns that scared off those who were unsure they were ready to go to Walgreens for “Personhood Tests.”

The measure collapsed because three constituencies got nervous: the medical community, Christians who had used in vitro fertilization (which may have been made illegal under the amendment), and, surprisingly, traditional allies of the anti-abortion movement, such as the Catholic Church, who were uncomfortable with the amendment’s vague language. Late polling found a 20-point drop in support from just a few weeks earlier.